About nosnhojn

I've been working in ASIC and FPGA development for more than 13 years at various IP and product development companies and now as a consultant with XtremeEDA Corp. In 2008 I took an interest in agile software development. I've found a massive amount of material out there related to agile development, all of it is interesting and most of it is applicable to hardware development in one form or another. So I'm here to find what agile concepts will work for hardware development and to help other developers use them successfully.
I've been fortunate to have the chance to speak about agile hardware development at various conferences like Agile2011, Agile2012, Intel Lean/Agile Conference 2013 and SNUG. I also do lunch-n-learn talks for small groups and enjoy talking to anyone with an agile hardware story to tell!
You can find me at neil.johnson@agilesoc.com.

SVUnit supports mixed language Verilog/VHDL unit testing. Finally. It didn’t take much to do it but for some reason it took me a loooooooong time to get at it. It involves a new switch to the runSVUnit command line. Users can … Continue reading →

I used to accept bugs as a part of what happens in hardware development. Start a new project, write a bunch of code, deal with the bugs that inevitably arise, stress out about whether I can fix them before development … Continue reading →

About a month has passed since the great unit testing discussion in the Verification Academy booth at DAC in Austin. It was my second year in the booth. Very grateful for having had the opportunity. It was a lot of fun! … Continue reading →

My kids play a game where they pick out people and argue about what their superpower is. If we’re all indeed born with a superpower, I’d have to say mine is ignorance. Admittedly – and, yes, unfortunately – this is a superpower … Continue reading →

Heads-up that we’ve moved SVUnit from Sourceforge to GitHub. This move was a long time coming, finally got it done a couple weeks ago. From now on, all new development will take place in the SVUnit GitHub repository. We may continue … Continue reading →

Kind of. I regularly hear that part of why designers don’t have time for unit testing RTL is because they’re under extreme pressure to deliver RTL to PD. I have very little experience in this direction but I think it’s so … Continue reading →

Seeing unit testing catch on and flourish with a new team has made the last few months at work pretty fun for me. Getting to this point, though, has been a ton of work. Considering the journey toward unit testing can … Continue reading →

In a post a couple weeks ago called Sorry Design Engineers, I Can Do Better, I told design engineers that I’d do a better job of giving them what they need to unit test their RTL. I felt like I’ve … Continue reading →

I’m looking for a list of discussion topics for a panel discussion that’ll happen at DAC in June. It’ll be a very informal/interactive session. We’ll take a list of topics and cycle through them in a series of 5-10min discussions. Audience will … Continue reading →